Automatic Line-Breaking for Khmer Now Available!

We are pleased to announce that LibreOffice Pre-Release 3.6 (Download: LibO-Dev_3.6.0.0.beta2_Win_x86_install_multi.msi or newer) now incorperates the latest ICU version which has the ability to automatically line-break Khmer Unicode (which we posted about previously here). This means you no longer have to manually add a zero-width space between words in order to correctly line-break in your documents! The screen-shots below show a sample LibreOffice document in LibreOffice 3.5 (that does not automatically line-break Khmer), a document with manual zero-width spaces added, and a document in LibreOffice Dev 3.6 with automatic Khmer line-breaking. As you can see the results are looking good!

LibreOffice Without the New ICU Automatic Khmer Line-Breaking

LibreOffice with Manual Word-breaks Added

LibreOffice Dev 3.6 With Automatic Khmer Line-Breaking

The automatic word-breaking does not yet currently work for spell checking, so in order to spell check in Khmer you will still need to continue to manually add zero-width spaces between words – but this is a great step forward for the Khmer language on computers! And hopefully in the near future we will no longer need to manually add spaces between words in Khmer in order to spell check.
Please try out the new LibreOffice pre-release and let us know how it works for you. Any issues you have with line-breaking (if something breaks incorrectly), please let us know in the comments so we can work towards debugging and increase the accuracy of the word-breaker in ICU. Special thanks to George for helping us make this a reality.